CHILDREN/FAMILY/OTHER LIFE – that most women are still dealing with the bulk of childcare, at the very least have to take some time out to give birth (!), and that theatre – as it stands – rarely (if ever) makes accommodation for part-time/family oriented/non-obsessive working practices. While acknowledging that our state is better than that of women in film right now, there are still many places that can be improved.Potential solutions : job share, don’t tell the men we’re working with that we’re working less hours but still getting the job done!, do what suits us and they’ll get used to it, help society to understand more the value of bringing up children (potential audiences!!), find a way to get away from the obsessive culture that insists we work all hours.

(nb – why is it that when a woman writes/makes a play about family, it’s ‘domestic’, but when Mike Leigh does it, it’s ‘universal’?)

CONFIDENCE –Why don’t we have it? How can we get it? Why are we afraid to show it when we do have it?Potential solutions : find a way to mentor each other, mentor young women, celebrate ourselves for what we are, IF we do work differently – that’s fine, stop worrying about alienating our employers, stop putting our ambition aside (from fear among other reasons)And … we’re going to have a salon!! It may become a monthly thing, it may happen once and never again, it may become huge or small or not at all. It will be what it is. But the first one will be within the next month. (apologies to anyone who would also like to attend, who was not in that meeting, the choice is to keep it to the size of that group for the FIRST one simply because that’s as many people as can fit in Stella’s lounge. Thereafter we’ll find how many of us there might be and see what sort of space we need to have. It will be the space it needs to be.

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We live now in information - it is our environment. An aspect of what we can do in response to current events is the information we have about what's actually going on. Perhaps if we can clean up the information environment we will make better decisions about what to do next.

We combined two discussions, one about what it was to navigate the world of theatre with a female body and the other about what it was to navigate that world with a working class voice. There are many parallels.

To get more diversity in our arts scene we will need to deal with the emotional undercurrents that are fueling our behaviour and impeding progress. What solutions do we have for addressing this? We did focus on what it means to be a woman who is doing this. What is below is not a prescription, rather a record of our discussion.

"How do we improve female working class visiblility in the arts?" was the question posed at the start of day.
As a female arts sector leader (Festival Director - therefore a programmer, fundraiser, commissioner, debater, network lead/contributor, ambassador, etc), I felt it was important to ask what people wanted or needed from me, as someone who has a voice -in certain spaces- to offer. I was trying to buck the assumption that I would already know what women wanted from their peers and lead

The use of co-productions between opera houses across different parts of the world is claimed to be a way to pool companies’ resources and save money. However, is a consequence of this practice that such productions are likely to communicate less effectively with the audience of any single theatre because they are trying to reach too many different audiences at the same time and because taste varies so greatly across the world?

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